Part of the Global Plot to Expose Moonbats, conspiracy nuts, and anti-Semites, especially the Jewish anti-Semitic variety.
The leftwing Neo-Nazi web magazine Counterpunch has described Plaut thus: "One of the most pernicious writers is Steven Plaut, a man who could be thought of as Israel's Daniel Pipes."

Sunday, March 15, 2009

The Israeli Academy and the Gaza War

On December 27th, 2008 Israel embarked upon Operation Cast Lead, acampaigned designed to punish Hamas for its ongoing rocket and mortarattacks on Israel. Between 2005 and December 2008 some 8,000 rockets andmortars had been fired from the Gaza Strip into Israel, principally atborder communities such as Sderot. With the end of a six month ceasefire inNovember of 2008 hundreds of more rockets and mortars had been launched byHamas.

From December 27th until January 3rd, 2008 Israel conducted an extensive aircampaign against Hamas, killings its members, bombing its smuggling tunnels,attacking its rocket launching sites and destroying its administrativebuildings and police posts. On January 3rd , 2009 Israeli ground forcesentered the Gaza strip and until the 17th of January, when Israel announceda unilateral ceasefire, they attempted to find and defeat Hamas forces andprevent further rocket fire on Israel.

From the second day of the operations protests were unleashed throughout theworld, from the Middle East to Europe and South America. Protests in the UKwere some of the most extreme, with some 3,000 protestors gathering outsidethe Israeli embassy on December 28th in what would become a daily protest.The use of 'Israel is like the Nazis' imagery was common, with signsdeclaring "Stop the Holocaust in Gaza" being but one example. Israel itselfalso witnessed local protests against the war from its first few days, withhundreds marching in Tel Aviv. The outcry against Israel in late 2008 and2009 was a replay of the voices that had been raised during the SecondLebanon War in 2006 and the Second Intifada between 2000 and 2001 and hasbeen typical of the discourse against Israel since her foundation in 1948.

The English Club of 'Israeli' Professors against Israel

Prominent among the voices was that of Avi Shlaim who is described often asan "Israeli scholar." Shlaim is an Iraqi-born Jew who immigrated to Israeland served in the IDF in the 1960s, before moving to the U.K to pursue hisacademic studies. His total time living in Israel was between the ages offive and sixteen and then from 18 to 23. Meron Rapaport wrote in August of2005 in Haaretz (Avi Shlaim: No Peaceful Solution) that he is the "third andleast familiar of the New Historians." In one transcription of a speech hegave in February of 2005 Shlaim claimed "Zionism today is the real enemy ofthe Jews," he insinuated that Israeli actions are responsible for the risein Anti-Semitism ("Israel's policies are the cause, hatred of Israel andanti-Semitism are the consequences") and that Israel is the greatest threatto world peace (citing a 2003 Eurobarometer poll).

In January of 2009 Shlaim published an article in the Guardian entitled,'How Israel brought Gaza to the brink of humanitarian catastrophe.' Hedescribed himself as an Oxford Professor who "served loyally in the Israeliarmy" and who "utterly rejects the Zionist colonial project beyond the GreenLine." The article was subsequently republished in the Tehran Times.

In the article he claimed that the 2005 withdrawal from the Gaza strip was"staged" and that "Hamas, the Islamic Resistance movement" had created a"humiliation" for Israel. He claimed that "withdrawal from Gaza was thus nota prelude to a peace deal with the Palestinian Authority but a prelude tofurther Zionist expansion in the West Bank." He accused Israel of "never inits entire history [having] done anything to promote democracy on the Arabside...collaboration with reactionary Arab regimes." He described Hamas'rocket attacks as "primitive...pinpricks."

Shlaim defended Hamas and described how they "kept up their resistance andkept firing their rockets," adding his assertion that Israel practiced"terrorism." He also claimed that the "Palestinian people succeeded inbuilding the only genuine democracy in the Arab world with the possibleexception of Lebanon." Shlaim's rhetoric, which, when published in theTehran Times, no doubt speaks to the regime of Mahmud Ahmadinjed and feedshis own hatred of Israel and the Jews, is a fascinating blend of extremistexcuses for Palestinians, on the one hand, and condemnations for Israel onthe other. Israeli democracy is faulty but Palestinian democracy is genuine.Hamas and its rockets are pinpricks but Israel targets civilians in aterrorist manner. Shlaim, author of Lion of Jordan, has often lionized Arabdictators while belittling and condemning Israel's leaders. Arab suppressionof Palestinian nationalism, such as by Jordan, is not condemned unless it isin the context of claiming that Israel collaborated and encouraged it.

But while Shlaim's ideas and extremism are disturbing and full of hypocrisyand double standards, he is hardly the "Israeli academic" he likes to claim.Like with other 'Israelis' living in England, the Israeli-Palestinianconflict serves as bread and butter for people who use their Israelicitizenship as a currency to bash Israel. They get published as 'Israeliacademics who condemn Israel,' but rarely, if ever, live in Israel. They donot have contact with it nor wish to return to it.

This is the case with Haim Beresheet (also Chaim Bresheeth), an academic atthe University of East London (since 2002), who signed a letter, along with300 others and published it in the Guardian in mid January of 2009 declaringthat "Israel must lose" in the war with Hamas. For Beresheet it was all a"criminal use of force" by Israel, which was committing "massacres" in Gazain a war "waged against the people of Palestine." The letter went on to<http://jta.org/news/article/2009/01/18/1002334/british> note that because"we affirm the right to resist military aggression and colonial occupation,then we are obliged to take sides... against Israel, and with the people ofGaza and the West Bank." It was also signed by Ilan Pappe, a professor atthe University of Exeter. Pappe, unlike Beresheet and Shlaim, is a recentaddition to the anti-Israel ex-Israeli academic establishment in the U.K. Heonly left the University of Haifa in 2007 after having supported severalacademic boycotts against his own university. The boycotts would not,apparently, have applied to him, because they included a way for academicsin Israel to sign documents affirming their opposition to Israel and thus be"cleared" and allowed to publish again by those boycotting Israeli academia.

Yosefa Loshitzky, from the University of East London, also stresses herIsraeliness in an article for the anti-Semitic pro-jihad web magazineCounterpunch on January 5th, 2009. She describes the Palestinians as the"poorest people in the world," and described Israel's foreign minister as a"peroxide blond" who uses "sex" as part of Israel's "oiled propagandamachine."

The extremism of the anti-Israel 'Israelis' in the UK is not new. Togetherwith local anti-Semitic British Jews, they include Gilad Atzmon, BenBirnberg, Prof Haim Bresheeth, Paul Eisen, Mark Elf, Deborah Fink, BellaFreud, Tony Greenstein, Abe Hayeem, Prof Adah Kay, Yehudit Keshet, Dr LesLevidow, Prof Yosefa Loshitzky, Prof Moshe Machover, Miriam Margolyes,Roland Rance, Prof Jonathan Rosenhead. All have been involved in anti-Israelrhetoric and even calls for boycotts for some years. Most have declared thatas people of "Jewish origin," the siege of Gaza is one in which they are"reminded of the siege of the Warsaw ghetto" and so must be stopped through"boycott, divestment and sanctions" of Israel. Being Israeli and having"Jewish origin" helps get them attention. They have nothing but contempt forIsrael. They know that as "Israelis," their voice is more interesting thanthose of ordinary academics in the UK, especially when they join theextremist comparisons of Israel to the Nazis, crusaders and apartheidpractitioners. As members of UK academia, their calls for boycott no longeraffect themselves personally. Hence, while they claim Israeli origin whenthey sign petitions, they do not claim to be 'Israeli' academics when theysubmit things for publication to the very journals they think should beboycotting Israeli academics. That could harm themselves.

Israeli Academia at Israeli Universities react to the Gaza War

If the reactions of the Israeli members of UK academia were as expected, itmay be more surprising to note that some Israeli academics inside Israeltook a firm stand against their country's defensive actions in the Gaza warof 2008-2009. During the 2000-2004 Intifada it sometimes happened thatIsraeli University students were murdered in bus bombings while on the wayto listen to their Israeli university professor lecture about the justice ofthe Palestinian cause and the legitimate "resistance" of bombing Israelicivilians on buses. Israeli students whose grandparents had died in the gaschambers could listen to lectures by people like Hebrew University professorBaruch Kimmerling declaring that "if the Nazi program for the final solutionof the Jewish problem had been complete, for sure there would be peace todayin Palestine" (letter to the Guardian, October 2002).

With the end of the Intifada in 2004 and the death of Kimmerling, theseironies seemed to have been halted. But with the increasing range of Hamasrocket fired from Gaza, the specter raises its head again. Kassams havelanded on or near Sapir Academic College in Sderot and Ben Gurion Universityin Beersheba. Once again, students studying at a university or college inIsrael could well die from the very rocket being fired by someone whom theirprofessor or lecturer describes as a 'freedom fighter' or 'militant' with a'right to resist.'

Nurit Peled-Elhanan EU Sakharov Prize winner of 2001 teaches at the HebrewUniversity. On December 18th, she noted in a letter to the President of theEuropean Parliament that she was supporting the "heroes of Gaza... who areproving every day and every hour that no fortified wall can imprison thefree spirit of humanity and no form of violence can subdue life." She wroteof the "pogrom being carried out by the thugs of the Occupation army." Shespoke of Israel's "refusal to release freedom fighters, children and peaceleaders from the worst of prisons, while immersing all of us in the blood ofinnocent babes up to our necks."

On December 30th, 2008 Dr. Ran HaCohen of Tel Aviv University published anarticle entitled, "Pacifying Gaza," at the anti-Israel antiwar.com web site.(The same site has published several pieces claiming that Israel and theJews were really behind the 911 attacks on the United States.) There hewrote, "It will take [the] Labor [party] just about two thousand additionalcorpses to go from rags to riches, from a dead political party to anabsolute majority in parliament like in the good old days." HaCohenconcluded his article with the cry, "Do not to look for consistency,integrity, or intelligence where war criminals are involved." Neve Gordon,chair of the department of politics and government at Ben-Gurion Universityof the Negev and author of Israel's Occupation (University of CaliforniaPress, 2008), echoed similar sentiments, claiming that the war was a cynicalattempt to gain votes. He published these claims in an article on December29th for the Guardian ('The Dire Cost of Domestic rivalries').

On December 31st Julia Chaitin, a senior lecturer at Sapir Academic College,published an article entitled, 'Darkness in the Land,' in the WashingtonPost. There she wrote that the Gaza campaign is "wrong" and "cruel." Sheclaimed, "(It) has been almost impossible to speak openly against the war",a frequent statement used by those who wish to pretend martyrdom as the'lone voice' speaking up against something. She claimed to "know the fastbeating of your heart and the awful pit in your stomach (referring to Jewishvictims of Hamas rocket attacks) that comes when a tzav adom -- red alert --is sounded, heralding a rocket attack. I know what it is like to comfortstudents and colleagues when the rockets strike very, very close."

Neve Gordon appeared on December 31st, 2008 writing in the same pro-terrorCounterpunch, in an article about the Israeli bombing of the IslamicUniversity in Gaza. He condemned the attack, writing, "By launching anattack on Gaza, the Israeli government has once again chosen to adoptstrategies of violence that are tragically akin to the ones deployed byHamas - only the Israeli tactics are much more lethal." On January 5th ,2009 Gordon again wrote of 'Israel's New War Ethic' in The Nation, sisterpublication of Counterpunch. He claimed, "After being stuck for seventy-twohours with our two young children inside a Beer-Sheva apartment, the spouseand I decided to visit my mother, who lives up north, so that our childrencould play outside far away from the rockets." He spoke of Israel pretendingto be "the perpetual victim," something that brings to mind Loshitzky's ideaof Jews who "replay the eternal Jewish victim (Electronic Intifada, January5th, 2009)." Gordon writes, "Not unlike raising animals for slaughter on afarm, the Israeli government maintains that it is providing Palestinianswith assistance so that it can have a free hand in attacking them."

On January 7th Hannah Safran, a founder of 'Women in Black' and currently onthe faculty of the Galilee Academic College, published in Counterpunch, 'Nomore recycled military solutions." She seems to imply in her article that anew intifada is brewing: "The Palestinians are fed up with this approach andthey are not likely to sit and wait peacefully until Israel realizes thatthere is no military solution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict."

On January 8th Dr. Shmuel Amir of Hebrew University published 'The Gaza war'at both the alternativenews.org and kibosh.co.il web sites. Therein heclaimed that Gaza was experiencing a "slaughter from the sky." This was allin the context of the "colonial relations between Jews and Palestinians." Hecompared Israel in Gaza to the battle of Omdurman in 1898, "the Englishcolonialist campaign of that time resembles the air campaign against Gaza inanother important respect as well: the Israeli admiration for the'extraordinary achievement' of the slaughter in Gaza." He speaks of a"continuing Zionist colonial war that has been going on for over a hundredyears." He compares casualty figures and states, "Those facts should betaken into account when we grapple with the question of who are theterrorists here or what is the extent of 'Hamas terror' compared to the'state terror' of Israel." He concludes that the relations are those betweencolonialist and "native."

On January 10th, 2009 Oren Yiftachel of Ben Gurion University in Beershebawrote an oped at Yediot Ahronot entitled 'Gaza's Lost Time, in which heclaimed that Israel's occupation had a "cruel and persistent aim - thesilencing of Palestinian epoch, that is, the erasure of this country'scomplete history." Like others, he noted that the Gazans were firing rocketsinto Israeli areas from which they supposedly came as refugees, such asBeersheba and Sderot (Loshitzky insisted that Gazans were "originating fromthe area currently being rocketed from Gaza"). For Yiftachel, "Hamasrejected the illusion of 'two states for two people', which itself became anempty mantra, one that enables the interminable continuation of the colonialoccupation." He described Israeli "state terror" and the need for a"termination of Israeli colonial rule."

In a different article, 'The Jailer State,' published by Yiftachel onJanuary 12th, he claimed that Gaza was a "massive prison" and compared it tothe situation in Darfur and to South African Apartheid Bantustans. He spokeof Hamas' terror being the same as "rebelling prisoners in Gaza." He wrote,"When the conditions of imprisonment become unbearable, a rebellion erupts."He added, "Palestinian violence plays an important part in the creation ofthis geography, through the hostile dialectic between colonizer andcolonized... But Palestinian violence, and particularly the shelling fromGaza should also be perceived as a prison uprising, currently suppressedwith terror by the Israeli state, which kills many more civilians andcreates infinitely more damage than the initial act of resistance." Butthere seems a ray of hope, "constant rebellions are likely to undermine theincarcerating regime itself."

Dr. Haim Yaakoby of Ben Gurion University's Department of Political Scienceand a member of the radical Bimkom (Planners for Planning Rights), togetherwith colleague Prof. Zvi Bentwich (Physicians for Human Rights), publishedon January 14th, 2009 an open letter to Ehud Olmert speaking of the "clearand present danger to the lives" of civilians. They spoke of a "heavysuspicion [that] has arisen of grave violations of internationalhumanitarian law by military forces. After the end of the hostilities, thetime will come for the investigation of this matter, and accountability willbe demanded of those responsible." The harm caused to civilians was"unprecedented." It concluded that "this kind of fighting constitutes ablatant violation of the laws of warfare and raises the suspicion, which weask be investigated, of the commission of war crimes."

On January 14th, Ramzi Suleiman of the Department of Psychology of HaifaUniversity posted on Haifa's Segel-Plus chat list the claim, "At the end of2008, Israel has launched a wide genocide war against the PalestinianGazans." The same day Neve Gordon wrote, "I agree with the idea of a basicright to self-defense (for Palestinian Hamas terrorists). And the right toself-defense is a right to self-defense from violence. We have to understandthat the occupation itself is violence. It's an act of violence. Puttingpeople in a prison, in a prison of one million and a half million people andkeeping them there." It appeared on Amy Goodman's anti-Israel 'DemocracyToday' program.

On January 16th, 2009 the same Neve Gordon wrote in his usual forum,Counterpunch, an article entitled, 'How to sell Ethical warfare.' Itconcerned how the Israeli government was "claiming that Israel is carryingout a moral military campaign against Hamas." According to Gordon, "They[the Israeli government's actions] actually reveal Israel's unwillingness toconfront the original source of the current violence, which is not Hamas,but rather the occupation of the Gaza Strip."

On January 18th, 2009 University of Haifa sociologist Yuval Yonay, writingon the Segel-Plus chat list, endorsed comparisons of the actions of Israelto those of the Nazis in the Warsaw ghetto: "'He [Sir Gerald Kaufman, UK MP)also mentioned that an Israeli spokesman [sic] replied that many of thePalestinian victims (800 at the time, climbing to 1245 as of this morning)were militants "was the reply of the Nazi" and added: "I suppose the Jewsfighting for their lives in the Warsaw ghetto could have been dismissed asmilitants." If someone can find a logical flaw here, I am interested inseeing it." Yonay also spoke of war criminals; " I was careful about usingthe term 'war criminal,' but the disrespect [sic] of Palestinian [sic] livesseems to leave us with no other possibility."

Lev Grinberg, a "political sociologist" at Ben Gurion University, wrote onJanuary 21st at the online Islamic forum Aminnetwork.org an articleentitled, 'Black January,' where he claimed that the war in Gaza was a"black flag of illegality." He compared Israel to Nazi Germany, "It is as ifthe minister of history wished to show the Jews that the moral deteriorationof Germany in the 1930s could afflict any people, if the historicalcircumstances, their political leadership and the mass media led themthere." He described the Hamas terrorists as the modern moral equivalent tothe Maccabees, reminiscent of Shlaim's discussion of David and Goliathreversed. Grinberg wrote, "If indeed there is a struggle here of the weakagainst an occupying empire, it is the struggle of Hamas against Israel, notthe other way around."

Academics against the War in Gaza: Themes and Banality

Many of the Israeli scholars who opposed the war in Gaza did so under theincreasingly fashionable guise of being 'lone voices,' standing up theoppression of their own country. In the English language environment(including the internet) in which many of them published, this claim wasused as an all-purpose calling card and publicity gimmick. The most commonthemes in their writing are that of Gaza being a 'prison' and the need tocompare Israel's actions to some other ultra-evil regime. The favoriteregimes for comparison have been the Nazis, but sometimes apartheid southAfrica, Russian pogromists, or European colonizers can be recruited. Thetheme of Gaza being a colonized 'prison' is used in order to justify the'resistance' of Hamas, meaning its terror and rockets. This recycles thedialectic of Albert Memmi's Colonizer and Colonized or Fanon's Wretched ofthe Earth. Under the logic of "post-colonialism," the colonized is alwaysallowed any extreme so long as he is opposing what can be dismissed ascolonialism.

The idea of Israel being a 'colonizer' is used obsessively, yet all theanti-Israel authors know perfectly well that Israel left Gaza and has no'settlements' there. Therefore there is the need to deconstruct andre-define what 'colonialism' entails. Such people argue that, since Israelcontrols the 'borders' of Gaza, it is a colony. Of course the northernborder of the United States is controlled by Canada. No one thinks thatgives Americans the right to bomb Vancouver. Gaza also has a border withEgypt.

The idea of Gaza being a 'prison' is recruited as a justification for Gazaterror: Gazans supposedly have a 'right' to 'rebel' violently, the same wayprisoners supposedly have a right to 'resist' their jailers. As it turns outprisoners do not have a 'right' to rebel, especially when they themselvesare guilty, but the prison analogy is repeated ad nauseum.

Gaza's prison-like state is predicated on the idea that its people cannotleave and on their supposedly being poor. But they were made poorer recentlybecause they chose Hamas to control the place and then launched a war ofterror and aggression against Israel. As a point of comparison it is worthrecalling that from 1948 to the 1980s Israelis could not travel to anyneighboring Arab state and yet Israel was not considered a 'giant prison'whose population had an automatic right to murder as many people inneighboring countries as they desired. Other landlocked poor states whoseborders are closed and controlled by others, such as Lesotho, are notconsidered prisons either.

A repeated theme is the idea of Gaza being one of the "most" impoverishedplaces on Earth. No statistics are ever presented to back this up and it isa patently absurd claim. The poor in Gaza are richer per capita than are themiddle classes in much of Africa and in parts of the Middle East, Asia andSouth America. The poor of Gaza are beneficiaries of huge amounts ofinternational aid, per capita the greatest recipients in the world. Oneindicator of how phony the claim of poverty is can be seen in the fact thatmany hundreds of Ukrainian women have married Gazan men. It appears life inGaza is better than life in Ukraine. (Some of these women were allowed toexit Gaza in 2006 due to the election of Hamas, and again in 2009 due to theoutbreak of fighting).

Israel-hating "academic" publicists frequently try to turn the idea ofterrorism on its head and describe a system of "Israeli terror". The claimof "disproportionate" Palestinian casualties is often raised, with theinsinuation that not enough Israelis are dying. If only hundreds moreIsraeli civilians had died, the war would be 'proportionate.' If Israel hadonly used 'primitive' rockets rather than guided missiles, there might bemore 'proportion.' Internationally celebrated Israeli author A.B. Yehoshuadescribed this problem with the call for 'proportionality' in an open letterto extreme Israel critic and columnist Gideon Levy of Haaretz in the midstof the Gaz war; "There is something absurd in the comparison you draw aboutthe number of those killed. When you ask how it can be that they killedthree of our children and we cause the killing of a hundred and fifty, theinference one can draw is that if they were to kill a hundred of ourchildren (for example, by the Qassam rockets that struck schools andkindergartens in Israel that happened to be empty), we would be justified inalso killing a hundred of their children. (Haaretz 'An Open letter to GideonLevy', January 16 2009.)"

Another gimmick noted in the outbursts by academics during the war is theuse of Jewish history and use of Hebrew words to make their articles seemmore "genuine." The propagandists commonly adopt Israeli terms such as'crying and shooting' or bokhim ve-yorim. They employ the imagery of Jewishhistory, such as David and Goliath or the Maccabees, with the insistencethat the Jews have reversed roles. The Jews are now Goliath or the Greeksfighting the Maccabees, while the Palestinians are a sort of 'new Jews', aDavid or Judah Maccabee. The Arabs are fighting in the 'Warsaw ghetto' ofGaza against the 'holocaust' being carried out by Israel. From the streetsof Europe to Indonesia and among some Israeli academics, this idea is nowquite common.

What is most common is the lack of depth and the easy and predictablecriticism thrown at Israel. It is most obscenely seen in the knee-jerkcomparisons of Israeli actions to those of the Nazis. Gaza becomes aconcentration camp or a ghetto, and Israelis become German Nazis.

There is a sort of group-think among those who condemn Israel. Every day onefinds masses of Israeli writers complaining of being the 'only one' speakingout against Israeli 'crimes.' The Israeli academics whose articles weresurveyed here write about rockets falling on their communities and campusesand the need to move their children to escape the fire, but they don'tmention who is actually firing the rockets: Hamas and friends.

Ben-Gurion University was closed for weeks as Hamas rockets landed in andnear Beersheba. According<http://www.isracampus.org.il/third%20level%20pages/BGU%20-%20Neve%20Gordon%20-%20denounce%20Israel.htm> to Prof. Steven Plaut, "Several rockets landedclose to the campus. Public-school buildings in Beersheba were destroyed byrockets." Never has the cost of an education been so high. Here we haveIsraeli students being targeted by terrorists and risking death, while insome cases that very same terror is being celebrated and supported byextremists employed as faculty members in the same institutions.